“When I first dived on the Inayet, I had a visual experience that was unprecedented during my twenty years of diving for underwater archaeology… with the Inayet there was this impeding darkness looming in the bottom of the sea as I approached. Resting on her starboard side with the stern stretching to the infinity of the deep sea, she gave me a feeling I had not experienced before. In spite of the fact that she has been heavily salvaged, at times with the brutality of explosives, she still gave me the eerie feeling that she could straighten herself out, rise above the bottom and steam on to her destination as if nothing had happened.” Captain Tufan Turanli, The History in our Seas (1999) 141.
she had already killed a man. A blow-off pipe of the port boiler had burst with lethal force off the coast of North Africa, perhaps the result of constantly running the engine at maximum power. Inayet was originally designed with a two-cylinder double expansion engine, and her 250 HP was inadequate from the start. Incredibly, even after the ship’s gross tonnage had been increased from 1280 to 1484, the Inayet was refitted with a smaller engine delivering only 150 HP. It was shortly after this that the fatal accident occurred. By the time the Inayet came into the possession of the Ottoman Steam Navigation Company, her gross tonnage had risen to 1513, with no increase in HP. She served her new owners for ten years before her fatally under-powered engine delivered its final protest on December 29th, 1902. Inayet was driven onto the rocks of our cape and hung there for a time, battered by the wind and waves, before sinking down to her present sandy resting place. Her blasted and battered hull has lain there for almost a century.
know what mistakes or misfortunes lead to their final disaster. Most of the time we don’t even know what they looked like, for all that remains is the imperishable cargo: a pile of amphoras or roof tiles, or a tumbled mountain of marble. But perhaps the stories of ancient shipwrecks are not all that different from the story of the Inayet. The decision to send an under-powered, over-weighted ship out to sea in the middle of winter probably seemed like a reasonable risk at the time. Greed and miscalculation, not to mention the unpredictability of the Aegean, are not factors limited to the age of sail, and the wreck of Inayet provides a dramatic illustration of this point. For underneath the ruin of her weed-encrusted bow, half-buried amphoras mark the grave of another ship, a Byzantine ship. Separated by a thousand years and united by disaster, these two ships came to rest in exactly the same place. Of all the strange things we have seen in our ‘Bermuda Triangle’, surely nothing is more strange than this.